This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Malcolm Gladwell explores the nature of success

If there is one thing that this country produces in abundance, it is superior hockey talent. But Malcolm Gladwell, insists that Canada is a long way from maximizing its capacity to create future Bobby Orrs and Wayne Gretzkys.

If there is one thing that this country produces in abundance, it is superior hockey talent. But Malcolm Gladwell, the Elmira, Ont.-bred New Yorker contributor and bestselling author, insists that Canada is a long way from maximizing its capacity to create future Bobby Orrs and Wayne Gretzkys.

"In hockey, which is something we care about in this country, we are nowhere close to exploiting the full amount of talent," said Gladwell during a Toronto stop yesterday to promote his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success.

"The reason the hockey example is so compelling is that it's something that we care about and we still screw up in terms of developing talent.

"If we don't do a good job of exploiting talent in hockey, how bad a job must we be doing in things that we don't care as much about, but that might be more important? It's very sobering."

How Canada can produce more world-class hockey players is but one of the subjects probed in Outliers, which argues that individual success is largely owed to external factors.

Article Continued Below

In the case of hockey, for instance, players born in the first third of the calendar year have a decisive edge because the age advantage they start with becomes amplified, rather than nullified, over time.

Simply put, a January kid is nearly an entire year older than a December kid born in the same year, but both are treated by the minor league hockey system as equals. At the age of 7 or 8, when players are selected for elite travel teams, being even half a year older can be decisive. Making the travel team means more ice time. And as Gladwell illustrates elsewhere in his thesis, practice is crucial to getting ahead, regardless of the endeavour.

To bolster his argument, Gladwell cites several examples, including the fact that 17 of the 25 players on the 2007 Medicine Hat Tigers were born in the first four months of their birth year.

"Most towns where hockey is played have many, many hockey teams within a given age range. If you break the year into thirds, you will get more hockey players."

Outliers is Gladwell's third book, following The Tipping Point and Blink, which are similarly constructed and also grew out of his New Yorker reporting.

"I get interested in certain themes," he says.

"For Blink, I was interested in the general subject of rapid cognition. And with Tipping Point, I was interested in the idea of applying epidemiological ideas to social trends."

Outliers includes a chapter on the relationship between the ethnicity of commercial airline pilots and plane crashes, and another on why it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery of any particular skill. Throughout, Gladwell wades back into the age-old debate between nature and nurture.

"This is very much a nurture book," he says.

"There is almost no mention of genes at all, quite deliberately. We've been through an extreme nature period recently. I'm reacting against that."

Outliers has been derided by some critics who, far from taking issue with the book's premise, accuse its author of stating the obvious.

"The premise of the book – that no one does it alone – is obvious," Gladwell concedes.

"What's not obvious is trying to point out the additional factors that make up success. If somebody thinks that the stuff about plane crashes is obvious, then I've been asleep for the last 20 years.

"In a certain way, if somebody says what you've written is obvious, it's a compliment. You've made your case so plainly and clearly that it seems like something they would have known forever."

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com